Stewart Gilligan "Stewie" Griffin is a fictional character from the animated television series Family Guy. He is voiced by Seth MacFarlane and first appeared on television, along with the rest of the Griffin family, in the episode "Death Has a Shadow" on January 31, 1999. Stewie was created and designed by MacFarlane, who was asked to pitch a pilot to the Fox Broadcasting Company based on The Life of Larry and Larry and Steve, two animated shorts created by MacFarlane featuring a middle-aged man named Larry and an intellectual dog named Steve.
Stewie is a highly intelligent and precocious toddler who talks and behaves like an adult. He is the third child and second son of Peter and Lois Griffin, the youngest brother of Meg and Chris Griffin, and the older half-brother of Bertram. He began the series as a megalomaniacal sociopath obsessed with violence, matricide, and world domination. As the series progressed, particularly following the direct-to-video film Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story and the two-episode arc consisting of "Stewie Kills Lois" and "Lois Kills Stewie", the more devious and violent aspects of his personality were toned down, and he evolved into a more eccentric, friendly, and flamboyant character. He also developed a close friendship with the family's anthropomorphic dog, Brian, whom he frequently antagonized in earlier episodes. Stewie is widely regarded as the show's breakout character.
On March 12, 2026, it was announced that a spin-off series centered on Stewie Griffin, titled Stewie, had received a two-season order from Fox. The series is scheduled to premiere during the 2027–28 television season.
Role in Family Guy Stewie Griffin is portrayed as a one-year-old prodigy who has a sophisticated voice, American football-shaped head, and can speak very fluently in an upper-class British accent with quite-advanced vocabulary. He reaches his first birthday in the season 1 episode "Chitty Chitty Death Bang", and the family celebrates Stewie's birthday in a cutaway gag in the season 12 episode "Chap Stewie". As Stewie's first birthday was celebrated in the episode "Chitty Chitty Death Bang", it is safe to assume that it was Stewie's second first birthday in the episode "Chap Stewie". Very highly literate and able to cite pop culture references that long predate his birth, Stewie is also entranced by Raffi and Teletubbies.
Stewie succumbs to other childish tendencies; he believes Peter has truly disappeared in a game of peekaboo, often has difficulties understanding the concept of shapes, talks to his teddy bear Rupert as if he were alive, is overcome with laughter when Lois blows on his stomach; and has no idea how to use a toilet. MacFarlane has stated that Stewie was created to represent the general helplessness of an infant through the eyes of an adult. Per cartoon physics, his ability to move objects of greater weight than himself is not surprising to other characters, nor is his apparent ability to retrieve firearms from hammerspace or his ability to talk. According to "Don't Be a Dickens at Christmas", he understands German (but cannot speak it), as his great-great-grandmother is of German descent and the Pewterschmidts (except Lois) speak it. In "The Big Bang Theory" it is revealed that he is descended from Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci, on Lois's side of the family.
Stewie's mastery of physics and mechanical engineering is quite extraordinary and at a level of science fiction. He has constructed advanced fighter jets, mind control devices, a weather control device, a teleportation device, robots, clones, a working Transporter device from Star Trek, time machines, a Multiverse Transporter, and a shrinking pod, as well as an assortment of weapons including lasers, rocket launchers, and crossbows. Stewie employs these to cope with the perceived stresses of infant life (such as teething pain and eating broccoli) and to murder his mother, Lois, with mixed success at best depending on the objective. As made clear in the pilot episode, Stewie's matricidal tendencies are a result of Lois constantly and unwittingly thwarting his schemes, and so he desires to kill her to carry out his plans without her interference.
In other, later episodes, Stewie engages in other violent and criminal acts, including robbery, aggravated assault, carjacking, loan sharking, forgery, and killing off many minor characters (with a tank, guns, and other assorted weaponry).
Stewie eventually realizes his dreams of matricide and world domination in the sixth season two-part episode "Stewie Kills Lois" and "Lois Kills Stewie". The events are reverted in a deus ex machina ending, where most of the story turns out to be a computer simulation. Because of the rather disastrous ending for himself in the simulation, being shot and killed by Peter, he decides to put aside his outlandish plans of matricide and world domination for the time being.
Stewie shows a complete disdain for most people, especially Matthew McConaughey, but does show affection and even rare instances of kindness to his family. Such moments include his support for Meg (whom he traditionally calls "Megan") as when he chided Brian's coke-induced hostility to her ("The Thin White Line"), retracted his joke, "I hate you too, bitch" when Meg said "I hate you all" to the family ("Untitled Griffin Family History"), told his parents to stop their gross negativism on Meg's attempt at cooking and give her a chance ("Trading Places"), and wiped her tears during a weepy moment. On a more frequent basis though, Stewie constantly disrespects Meg, as he does with most elders (and as most people do to Meg), often being rude to her and subjecting her to the malice of his misbehavior, once even tricking her outside to be attacked by bees on steroids.
He generally thinks of Peter as an inferior—regarding him simply as "the fat man" and, at one point, harboring doubts that Peter could be his father ("Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story")—but does bond with him over a shared love of practical jokes made at Lois' expense ("The Courtship of Stewie's Father"). While Stewie typically regards Chris as a stooge, he considers him his only friend aside from Brian and even helped Chris to dress when he felt too shy to date ("Extra Large Medium") and assists him in dealing with bullies ("Secondhand Spoke"). In a few episodes, such as "Stewie Loves Lois", it is shown that Stewie can love his mother. In that episode, after Lois recovers and repairs a lost Rupert and serves Stewie a meal he likes, he rethinks Lois and accepts her as a loving mother. When he becomes too dependent on her, she deliberately takes no notice of him; when he hurts himself, she tries to show notice of him again, and he returns to hating her. However, at the end of the season nine premiere, "And Then There Were Fewer", when Diane Simmons is about to murder Lois for uncovering her murderous revenge scheme, Stewie secretly saves Lois by killing Diane with a sniper rifle, though he states to himself that he only did it to not miss out on the opportunity to kill Lois in the future.
Starting around season 8, Stewie starts to have a larger amount of freedom from his parents, usually spending much of his time with Brian. This extends to the point of his ability to keep pigs from parallel universes ("Road to the Multiverse") or take part in the television series Jolly Farm ("Go Stewie Go"), as compared to the first season, in which his plans were constantly hindered by Lois. In "The Hand That Rocks the Wheelchair", Stewie inadvertently clones an evil twin of himself after trying to increase his evil nature. By the end of the episode, original Stewie and evil Stewie look exactly the same, and to differentiate the two, Brian asks both to look at their feet, leading one of the twins to laugh (likely original Stewie, who typically laughs when staring at his feet) and the other twin to ask why he needed to look at his feet; seconds later, Brian shoots and kills one of the twins. It is possible that the original Stewie may have been unknowingly killed by Brian (since he cannot tell them apart) as Stewie turns to the camera with glowing yellow eyes (reminiscent of Michael Jackson's "Thriller") at the end of the episode, but this isn't referenced in later episodes, indicating that Brian very likely killed Stewie's evil twin and the yellow eyes were simply a gag.
Stewie also starts to interact with more people despite still having hatred towards many of them, as shown in cutaways in later episodes and is more flamboyant. Stewie is to be a superfan of Taylor Swift and even sets her up with Chris as a prom date. Stewie has had a few rare interactions with his pedophile elderly neighbor Herbert. Stewie intensely dislikes him and is one of the few characters fully aware of Herbert's nature, even calling him a pervert to his face. All this does, however, is move Herbert into thinking Stewie is "feisty".
In the season 16 episode "Send in Stewie, Please", it is revealed that Stewie's English accent is fake and that he has an American accent, although the follow-up joke that has him speak in numerous other voices (of Seth MacFarlane's other characters) suggests it was a mere gag.
Development
Stewie is voiced by Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, who also provides the voices of Brian Griffin, Peter Griffin, and Glenn Quagmire as well as numerous minor characters. MacFarlane based Stewie's accent on the voice of English actor Rex Harrison, particularly on Harrison's performance in the 1964 musical drama film My Fair Lady, with further influence coming from The Simpsons character Mr. Burns. MacFarlane has also linked Stewie with David Hyde Pierce on more than one occasion, saying he wants Pierce to play Stewie if a live action version of the show would ever be created.
Stewie's head has the shape of a rugby ball. In the episode "Stuck Together, Torn Apart", a cutaway shows Stewie's head to be normally shaped, until he hits it on the ceiling while bouncing on the bed, and it is elongated into the familiar shape. Flashbacks in "Chitty Chitty Death Bang", however, show his head was already shaped like a football when he was born.
Ambiguous sexuality Stewie's sexuality is ambiguous. When the writers began to flesh out Stewie's character beyond being a generic supervillain in season two, MacFarlane and the writers began to explore Stewie's sexuality with a series of one-off gags, which hinted in "Chick Cancer" and "We Love You, Conrad" that Stewie might be queer. One example is in the episode "Brian and Stewie", where Stewie's cellphone screensaver is of a muscular man. Another is where he has a picture of Chris Noth in his wallet and he expresses his wishes to have sexual relations with Brian's son, Dylan. In some episodes, such as "Turkey Guys" and "Send in Stewie, Please", Stewie appears to be on the verge of coming out of the closet when he is interrupted for comedic effect.
In other instances, such as when Stewie falls in love with a girl, Janet, in "Dammit Janet!", he is "a very unhappy repressed heterosexual" in Seth MacFarlane's words. In the commentary for Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, the writers describe how they were going to make Stewie discover he was gay but decided to scrap this idea to retain Stewie's sexual ambiguity for writing purposes. MacFarlane planned for the series third season to end with Stewie coming out after a near-death experience. The show's abrupt cancellation caused MacFarlane to abort these plans, and the episode "Queer Is Stewie?" was produced, but never shown. Since that point, MacFarlane has opted to have Stewie portrayed as sexually ambiguous, as, in his eyes, the flexibility of Stewie's sexuality allows for much more freedom in terms of writing for the character. MacFarlane later elaborated: